Speaker: Women in Tech Global Conference
Design is the missing operating system: Why AI, UX and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking - Upcoming May 13
As organizations race to adopt AI, redesign customer experiences, and modernize their tech stacks, many are hitting the same wall: the technology works, but the experience doesn’t.
This talk argues that the biggest failures in UX, CX, and AI transformation are not technical problems. They are design failures at the system level.
Drawing from real-world experience inside complex, digital-first organizations, this session reframes design as the connective tissue that aligns people, processes, data, and technology. Attendees will learn how invisible work, handoffs, language, incentives, and organizational structures, shapes user experience far more than screens or features alone.
This is a call to elevate design from execution to orchestration, and to recognize that great experiences emerge when organizations themselves are intentionally designed.
The Invisible Work of UX - Upcoming June 23, 2026
In most organizations, the work that gets celebrated is what can be shipped, demoed, or tracked on a dashboard. Yet the true power of UX often comes from invisible contributions: reframing problems so teams solve the right thing, bridging silos, stitching together incomplete systems, and shaping culture through listening and sensemaking. These acts rarely appear on roadmaps, but without them, products fail and organizations stagnate.
This session explores how to surface, value, and scale the invisible layers of UX. Through case studies from enterprises and startups, I will share how design leaders can make tacit influence visible, build trust with executives, and prevent teams from being reduced to pixel polishers. Attendees will learn to identify invisible contributions that drive impact, communicate this value to stakeholders, and scale connective UX work without burning out teams.
Talk: UXPA International 2026
Panel Discussion: UXCon, 2026
Inspire & Connect - Upcoming Oct 8, 2026
In this thought-provoking panel, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg explored the persistent gap between what organizations build and what customers actually need. Drawing on her experience leading design at scale, she challenged teams to move beyond surface-level insights and interrogate the assumptions driving their decisions.
She pushed the conversation toward a deeper, behavior-driven understanding of customers, emphasizing that true alignment does not come from more data, but from better interpretation of human needs in context. Through practical examples, she highlighted how teams can connect product, design, and business strategy in ways that create clarity rather than fragmentation.
The discussion ultimately reframed success away from output and toward meaningful impact. Attendees left with a stronger lens for evaluating their own work, along with tangible ways to shift from building features to solving the right problems.
Past Engagements
How to Strengthen Product Strategy with Design
This Delivery Fellowship session focuses on how design can strengthen product strategy and move from a supporting role to a strategic advantage inside modern organizations.
In many organizations, design is still treated as a service function that executes product tickets rather than helping shape product direction. Yet the companies building the strongest products today are those where design contributes to strategy, influences decisions, and improves measurable business outcomes.
In this session, we’ll explore how organizations can strengthen product strategy through design, identify where design maturity is missing, and understand how stronger design practices can improve product outcomes and reduce operational friction.
Panel Discussion: ADPList Chicago and Askable
Are You Designing Products That Truly Meet Customer Needs?”
In this thought-provoking panel, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg explored the persistent gap between what organizations build and what customers actually need. Drawing on her experience leading design at scale, she challenged teams to move beyond surface-level insights and interrogate the assumptions driving their decisions.
She pushed the conversation toward a deeper, behavior-driven understanding of customers, emphasizing that true alignment does not come from more data, but from better interpretation of human needs in context. Through practical examples, she highlighted how teams can connect product, design, and business strategy in ways that create clarity rather than fragmentation.
The discussion ultimately reframed success away from output and toward meaningful impact. Attendees left with a stronger lens for evaluating their own work, along with tangible ways to shift from building features to solving the right problems.
Designing for Impact: Transforming Organizations through
human-centered design
Twisha took the stage to unpack how human-centered design is not just a methodology, but a strategic lever for building organizations that actually work. Through a mix of real-world examples and hard-earned insights, she showed how embedding design into the core of organizational decision-making unlocks innovation, sharpens experiences, and fuels a culture where creativity and collaboration are not aspirational, but operational.
She brought to life how design moves beyond craft to become a catalyst for meaningful change. By aligning what organizations want to achieve with what people actually need, she demonstrated how design thinking cuts through complexity, accelerates outcomes, and creates coherence across teams, channels, and systems.
Instead of prescribing outcomes, she reframed what’s possible. The session challenged conventional approaches to problem-solving and invited leaders to rethink how their organizations operate at the intersection of strategy, systems, and human need. Attendees left with a sharper lens for identifying opportunities, asking better questions, and applying human-centered design in ways that are both practical and transformative.
Keynote Speaker: Abbvie UX Summit
Speaker: UXPA International
Radical Empathy: Path to Justice and Equity
In this session, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg explored how bias shows up in the products and systems we design, often reinforcing inequities for underrepresented groups. Through real-world examples, she highlighted how both product decisions and design systems can unintentionally exclude.
She introduced radical empathy as a starting point, challenging teams to examine their own identities, assumptions, and blind spots. Drawing from her work with cross-functional teams, she shared a simple framework for unpacking bias and widening the lens on both problem and solution.
The session focused on practical application, offering a toolkit and clear strategies to help teams build more inclusive products. Attendees left with actionable ways to embed equity into their process and move beyond intention toward meaningful change.